Anyway. In your quest to end your torture, you brave the inky blackness of the night. Up ahead is a monolithic cinderblock structure aglow with unearthly white light. "OPEN 24 HOURS," the towering sign promises, seducing you into the nearly deserted parking lot.

You are about to enter the twilight zone, a land where things are not quite right, and nothing is as promised. As a 20-megaton bank of fluorescent lights sizzles into your brain, you nod at the dual sentries -- a bored teen-aged girl with pieces of metal clipped into her nose, eyebrow, and lip, and a white-haired, 300-pound matron with a faint she-mustache. Extras from a George Romero "Afternoon of the Living Dead" feature? Naw, just the night crew.

You begin to doubt your senses, indeed your sanity, but then a strategically-placed table of "As Seen on TV..." products beckons. Before you lies the ability to make those curlie fries like at the Burger Tsar, the power to erase annoying pills from your favorite sweater, the will to grow your own alfalfa sprouts on a clay sheep. You are hooked, and you proceed into the Halls of Terror...

Witness the horror of:

Twenty-four hour film that is shipped across five states, dipped in a vat of chemicals, shot back through a maze of postal backrooms, and returned to you miraculously changed into the porno role-playing photos the perv behind you in line dropped off 12 days before.

Seventy-five flavors, strengths, colors, and forms of cold medication tailored to every conceivable combination of human genetics. You select the black cherry-flavored syrup-filled medium-strength caplets for middle-aged white collar Protestants with narrow septums.

Salted, jerkied strips of dry beef, pork, chicken, turkey, ostrich, and aardwolf, placed next to the wall-cooler full of $3 bottled water.

A staggering array of safe sex devices with ribs, bumps, reservoirs, and other accroutements you had no idea existed. As you goggle with vague curiousity at the guarantees of writhing ecstacy promised on each box, you are spotted by the white-haired clerk, who returns to her station and enters your name in the state's Sexual Offenders Registry.

And the Cash Register of Chaos, where the lip-ringed one cannot figure out how to swipe your check card, has never heard of a check card but thinks it's a neat idea, can't get it to clear (mainly because she's still trying to punch it in as a Platinum Master Card), and finally asks you if you could maybe just pay in cash 'cause this is really har-r-rd.

If you emerge from this pharmaceutical phasmagoria of phrenetic -- oh, ph***, phorget it. (Cough!) If you leave this chamber of horrors with your sanity intact, then you are ready to download...

Download drgstor.zip, and don't take them with any other decongestant or $1.23 drugstore wine.